I recently chatted with Eric Beetner for Writer Types podcast on historical fiction and the lure of the 1920s. Writer Types is part of the Lit Hub Radio. You can find my episode here or on your podcast subscription service. The whole episode is great and I’m at the very end.
I feel privileged to share with you four more interviews for Autumn Leaves, 1922.
You can listen to me at House of Mystery podcast.
You can listen to me at Living Arts Canberra.
You can read all about my book, with excerpts, at Jean BookNerd.
You can read all about my writing process at Women Writers, Women’s Books.
There are more on their way too! Thank you so much to Alan, Barbie, Jean, and Barbara for having me.
The new Kiki Button myster y is due out August 3rd 2021. Available for pre-order now.
Pegasus Books and Simon & Schuster
Internationally:
In the USA:
IndieBound and Barnes and Noble
In Australia:
Booktopia and Abbey’s Bookshop and Kinokuniya Sydney and Dymocks and Readings
After a year away from Paris, Kiki Button is delighted to be back in City of Lights. But danger threatens her return as she is pulled into another spy mission—one that brings her ever closer to the rising fascist threat in Europe.
October 1922. Kiki Button has had a rough year at home in Australia after her mother’s sudden death. As the leaves turn gold on the Parisian boulevards, Kiki returns to Europe, more desperately in need of Paris and all its liveliness than ever. As soon as she arrives back in Montparnasse, Kiki takes up her life again, drinking with artists at the Café Rotonde, gossiping with her friends, and finding lovers among the enormous expatriate community. Even her summertime lover from the year before, handsome Russian exile Prince Theo Romanov, is waiting for her.
But it’s not all champagne and moonlit trysts. Theo is worried that his brother-in-law is being led astray by political fanatics. Kiki’s boy from home, Tom, is still hiding under a false name. Her friends are in trouble—Maisie has been blackmailed and looks for revenge, Bertie is still lovesick and lonely, and Harry has important information about her mother. And to top it off, she is found by Dr. Fox, her former spymaster, who insists that she work for him once more.
Amidst the gaiety of 1920s Paris, Kiki stalks the haunted, the hunted, and people still heartsore from the war. She parties with princes and Communist comrades, she wears ballgowns with Chanel and the Marchesa Casati, she talks politics with Hemingway and poetry with Sylvia Beach, and sips tea with Gertrude Stein. She confronts the men who would bring Europe into another war. And as she uses her gossip columnist connections for her mission, she also meets people who knew her mother, and can help to answer her burning question: why did her mother leave England all those years ago?
I am also delighted to announce that my novel April in Paris, 1921: a Kiki Button mystery has been acquired by Pegasus Books in the US. This US edition is due for release on July 3rd, 2018 but is available for pre-order through the Pegasus site, Amazon, Book Depository and Booktopia. I’d like to thank Katie McGuire, Claiborne Hancock, my editor at Pegasus for all their hard work, and again, my agent Sarah McKenzie. And the cover designer too: the cover is magnificent.
On November 1st, my poem The Crowley-Fizelle School was published in Cordite 52: TOIL. It’s a brilliant edition, so make sure you check it out. A huge thanks to editor Carol Jenkins for accepting my work.
Tessa Lunney 